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Klein Slanders Friedman

A video interview of Naomi Klein, who’s promoting her new book, has some truly vicious slander of Milton Friedman. Klein says:

I start the book with a quote from Milton Friedman saying only a crisis, actual or perceived, produces real change. And you know Milton Friedman lived by this. His first laboratory was Chile under Augusto Pinoche, where the crisis was the coup and an economic crisis and it was after that that you had the economic shock therapy. And you also had another kind of shock which is torture, which was a way of enforcing these policies.

Klein seems to be insinuating that Friedman somehow orchestrated, supported, or encouraged the coup in Chile, or at least that he was an important Pinochet advisor. She also makes it sound like torturing people was one of Friedman’s policy recommendations. But here’s how Friedman tells the story:

MILTON FRIEDMAN: While I was in Santiago, Chile, I gave a talk at the Catholic University of Chile. Now, I should explain that the University of Chicago had had an arrangement for years with the Catholic University of Chile, whereby they send students to us and we send people down there to help them reorganize their economics department. And I gave a talk at the Catholic University of Chile under the title “The Fragility of Freedom.” The essence of the talk was that freedom was a very fragile thing and that what destroyed it more than anything else was central control; that in order to maintain freedom, you had to have free markets, and that free markets would work best if you had political freedom. So it was essentially an anti-totalitarian talk.

INTERVIEWER: So you envisaged, therefore, that the free markets ultimately would undermine Pinochet?

MILTON FRIEDMAN: Oh, absolutely. The emphasis of that talk was that free markets would undermine political centralization and political control. And incidentally, I should say that I was not in Chile as a guest of the government. I was in Chile as the guest of a private organization.

It’s true, of course, that Pinochet employed some of the economic policies Friedman had been advocating for decades, that some of Pinochet’s advisors had studied economics at the University of Chicago, and that Friedman subsequently cited the success of those policies. But just as Michael Moore’s endorsement of Cuba’s health care system doesn’t constitute endorsement of Castro’s dictatorial rule, so Friedman’s endorsement for Chilean tax or pension policies don’t constitute an endorsement of coups, purges, or torture.

There’s also some ideological slander at the heart of Klein’s argument, which she lays out later in the video. Klein seems to believe that Haliburton and Blackwater—companies that thrive on wartime corporate welfare—represent Friedman’s ideal society. Not only is this obviously wrong on a theoretical level, but it’s also flatly at odds with Friedman’s stated views. Milton Friedman was an opponent of the Iraq war and has been vociferous critic of corporate welfare for decades. Conflating Friedman’s advocacy of limited government with Bush’s interventionist foreign policy and profligate domestic spending illustrates either a failure to grasp the basics of Friedman’s position or a calculated attempt to play to the prejudices of her intended audience, many of whom will lump together anyone they don’t agree with as “right wingers,” even if they have little in common with one another.